What's the value of a Bill of Rights?

The standard mythology of the right is that the constitution established separation of powers and limited government. By restricting the power of the federal government through the enumerated powers and the bill of rights, the constitution thus restricts the ability of the government to tyrannise its citizens.

Well, that's the theory. The first clue that something has gone awry in this theory is that nobody talks any more about the enumerated powers as an obstacle to tyranny. Hey, wasn't the federal government only supposed to be able to legislate on a small number of specific topics? Like, for instance, the following (courtesy of the excellent A Crime A Day)

Okay, so the Federal Government now can legislate on absolutely anything that isn't explicitly prohibited by the Bill of Rights. This may seem to violate the text of the constitution, but that's just because you haven't paid enough attention to the penumbras and emanations.

Part of what we're running into is the problem Moldbug described quite aptly - limited government is a fiction because sovereignty is conserved. Who is doing the limiting? If it's the judiciary, then the judiciary is sovereign.

There are no governments by pieces of paper, only governments by men. If the judges choose to follow what's on the paper, then the paper wins the day. If they don't, then it doesn't.

But to bring the matter full circle, are the judges really sovereign? Can they decide anything they want?

Well, maybe. Judges didn't used to be so sovereign. Back in 1832, Andrew Jackson (apocryphally) said of a Supreme Court decision "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!". This was the Presidential equivalent of 'How many divisions has the Pope?'. Indeed, the similarities between the Pope vis a viz Stalin and the Supreme Court vis a viz the President are striking. There are relatively few federal officers directly answerable to the court across the land, which means that the courts are reliant on other people and branches of government to enforce their decisions. If everyone else chooses to obey, it is partly out of a) convention, and b) a quasi-religious reverence that got attached to Supreme Court decisions after Brown v. Board of Education. 

In other words, if the Supreme Court is sovereign, then it resembles the messy reality of what being King was actually like, rather than the textbook theory of absolute power. To wit, a large part of the skill of being king was knowing what orders would actually be obeyed and carried out, and limiting one's instructions to those. A king who goes too far in his estimation of his subjects' obedience and starts getting openly disobeyed won't stay as king very long.

At the moment, the Supreme Court just gets obeyed, out of a sense of duty. But if they pushed things too far in one go, that sense of duty might evaporate, and with it the whole prestige of the court.

And at last we see where written constitutions, or Bills of Rights specifically, might finally have some effect.

In particular, a statement on a piece of paper can serve as a strong coordination device- these things are disallowed under our system of government. Now, the sovereign is he who decides the exception, and a sovereign supreme court can decide when a particular constitutional provision doesn't apply.

But unlike the medieval kings (who obtained their right to be king by virtue of birth), the Supreme Court is in a bind. A substantial amount of its influence comes from the belief, even if deluded, that the court is actually following the piece of paper. Overrule that too explicitly, and the masses might lose their will to obey.

In order for this to work, however, the issue has to be something that a) people care about enough to challenge the nobility of the Supreme Court, and b) that people can agree on widely when the provision has been breached.

So which provisions might actually have a shot at forcing the court to do something that its individual members might not prefer to be done?

In this regard, 'Equal Protection' will be almost completely nugatory as a restriction on the court's personal preferences. What the hell does it guarantee? What needs to be equal with what? In fact,the very ambiguity lets it get used as a sword, to apply whatever leftist idea is the order of the day.

So what are the two areas that the Supreme Court has blinked on, at least relative to the view that Cthulu only swims left?

The big one was DC v Heller, when the Supreme Court unusually rejected the opportunity to gut the 2nd Amendment by claiming that it only allowed people the right to join a militia. 

This would have quite likely risked a total shitstorm, because gun owners really, really care about their guns, and every single one of them would have gone insane over this. I suspect some justices recognised this, and stepped back from the precipice. 

(Incidentally, this seems to be exactly what John Roberts did with Obamacare, changing his decision at the last minute rather than risking the court suddenly becoming public enemy number one with leftists, the court's natural constituency at the moment).

The other case, curiously, is the First Amendment.

Now, on the face of it, you may think that America has all sorts of restrictions on free speech, and you'd be right.

But you can rest assured that there is nothing on the books as repulsive as Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act in Australia, or the loathsome Human Rights Commissions in Canada that Mark Steyn had to battle with for years, or the repugnant British prosecutions of people for racist tweets.

On the issues that the left cares about, America still has fewer governmental prohibitions than nearly all comparable western countries. 

Now, it may be that America is just more conservative on this stuff. But if you look at how rabidly leftists at American colleges treat these issues, or how radioactive accusations of racism are, it's hard to countenance that.

Rather, I think that Congress and the Courts haven't yet had the gumption to make a big push to overturn this, because unlike equal protection, it would be pretty indisputable that the provision had been ignored.

In the case of free speech, I am sadly pessimistic about its long term prospects. At some point, when the hysteria over racism becomes sufficiently widespread, expect the Supreme Court to carve out some unprincipled exception that 'hate speech is different from free speech'.

But they're not there yet, because it would still be a risky move. 

In the rest of the world, however, it wasn't. Without the coordination mechanism of a long-standing bright red line, people just sat there and took it.

In the US, they'll probably end up taking it too, but the piece of paper maybe bought us 20 years or so.

That may not be much in the long run, but it's something.

Initial Thoughts on the Coup Attempt in Turkey

It is always hazardous writing about coup attempts before everything is done and dusted, but the recent one in Turkey is notable in several respects. 

Also, unusually for this type of thing, I was watching the updates in real time, so there's a few things that stuck out to me that might not be so obvious if you just read about it the next day.

The most striking thing is the extent to which everybody, myself included, misread the most important moment of the whole proceedings. 

It was this:

That is Turkish President Erdogan, giving a press conference by facetime, assuring people that everything is just fine.

Up to this point, you may recall, there had already been reports on official Turkish State TV that the coup had succeeded (past tense), that a peace council was now in charge of the country, and a curfew was in effect. The reports in the press were tending towards announcing the coup as a fait accompli.

So, given that background, what do you what do you make of this?

The popular response to this was twofold. Firstly, derision. A press conference by phone indeed is farcical. This kind of reaction was typical.

Chortle.

I mock, but I shouldn't. If my response had been fixed publicly in time, it probably wouldn't have looked much more sophisticated.

Second, most people looked at this and saw Baghdad Bob. It's hard to convey the impression that you're in charge of the situation from behind a phone. What it looks like is someone who's already packed their bags and is getting the hell out of dodge.

In other words, it wouldn't matter what he was saying, the real message was that it was over and the leader had fled. The coup had won.

It turns out, people were so focused on the absurdity of the situation that they missed what he was saying. 

He was telling people to take to the streets and protest, focusing on the main squares and airports.

And this was a really, really, important message to get across.

Because he had enough supporters that they really did take to the streets. You're not Baghdad Bob if you still have a massive army of supporters at your disposal, even if you are behind a phone screen.

The next thing that became apparent was something that the War Nerd has noted a long time ago - driving tanks around urban environments without infantry support, which is what the army was doing, is a recipe for disaster. This is especially true when the opponents have RPGs, but even in Istanbul there were rumors of tanks being disabled by people throwing sheets over them, pulling the crews out, etc. Not to mention the photos of civilians lying in front of tanks, daring the military to drive over them. Which it turns out they lacked the gumption to do. The apparently impregnable tanks being taken over by protestors became a really depressing metaphor for the whole event, at least if you  were hoping for it to succeed.

What's really, really important in coups is Schelling Points. Why is a facetime speech still really valuable? For the same reason that controlling State TV (which the coup plotters also did early on, and then lost) is really important, actually even more important. You thought TV was obsolete, didn't you? Not in a coup it's not.

Partly, it conveys a sense of official power. The main information outlet is now owned by the coup. Erdogan is reduced to a telephone, which is not nearly as good. So far, so good for the plotters, at least early on. 

But much more importantly, it conveys the same message to lots of people all at once. And it turns out facetime is just fine for this purpose. What the government forces couldn't do until that point was to coordinate the behavior of their supporters. When they all started hitting the streets at once, everything changed. Suddenly the military had a much bigger problem on its hands.

All security forces exist based on force projection and self-fulfilling beliefs. If everyone committed crimes all at once, the police don't have nearly enough people to arrest them all. Law and order is maintained because for the vast majority of people, each one believes that law enforcement will arrest him, John Q Citizen, if he commits a crime. Hence most people don't commit crimes, the belief in the authority of the police is maintained, and order persists. The only time this breaks is during a riot, when people realise that they can just loot stuff because there aren't enough police to arrest them all, and the police aren't doing anything anyway.

So this problem exists for security forces at the best of times. But it's even more severe during a coup.

In a coup attempt, everyone is looking to see which way everyone else is going to jump.

If people think the coup has succeeded, they will stop fighting, and the coup will actually succeed. This was what  was initially happening, as far as I can tell, in the initial stages.

But the reverse is true. If people think the coup is failing, they will resist it, and some of the soldiers will surrender to the police, and this will depress morale of the rest. Moreover, this starts to happen at the point when you're relying on the soldiers to start shooting ever more of their unarmed countrymen. That takes a lot of martial discipline at the best of times. 

What this tells you is that you can judge a lot about a coup's success just by who is making more official announcements. It doesn't even matter what they are. As soon as Erdogan's official statements started appearing regularly on my twitter feed, I strongly suspected that the gig was up.

As of writing, it's not "over" over. There keep being reports of ongoing fighting, jets bombing Erdogan's palace, jets bombing the airport (whose jets? great question). 

But you're sure not hearing anything out of the coup leaders, and that bodes very poorly for them.

You can also judge a coup's success by the passage of time. The longer it goes on, the worse it looks for the plotters. In the ideal case, it's instant and bloodless. But they're fighting to reverse the default presumption of power. When that momentum starts to falter, it can reverse very quickly.

To slightly modify the great Sun Tzu, though we have heard of stupid haste in coups, cleverness has rarely been seen associated with long delays.

Finally, there is the role of the west in all of this. 

A perennial question in matters of statecraft is the extent to which organised US power is actually running the world from behind the scenes, or catching up as a mostly clueless observer.

I don't think you and I will ever really know.

But one thing I do know is that all the official western outlets were conspicuously silent about the whole affair until after the protesters started hitting the streets. Then came the announcements that we need to support the democratically elected government of Turkey etc etc. Before that were rumors that Erdogan had been seeking asylum in Germany but his plane had been denied permission to land.

It seems that it's not just people in Turkey who are waiting to find out which way the wind is blowing. 

And because it failed, I doubt we will ever really know who was behind it. In the weird three-way war between the 1) secular parts of the Turkish military, 2) the Gulen cultists and 3) the Erdogan supporters, it's not clear whether this was group 2 alone, group 1 alone, or group 1 and 2 in combination. Erdogan is blaming this on Gulen, but he'd be crazy to not use the opportunity to consolidate his power over them, even if he thought it was the secularists.

Successful changes of government have a thousand fathers, but a failed coup is the most despised orphan of them all.

The perils of reading the fake government org chart

Out of the many oddities of the democratic process in the west, two points stand out.

First, the average citizen has very little idea about how his government works.

Second, the average citizen has very little idea that he has very little idea about how his government works.

If pushed, I think the second point is the more remarkable one. It is quite an amazing feat of propaganda. The evidence that government doesn't work the way most people assume it does is all around them. But they somehow manage to never notice.

I think it comes back to the distinction between the real and the nominal organisational chart of government.

In the case of China, your average American understands that he has no idea how its government functionally operates. Furthermore, he also assumes, rightly, not to trust the notional description coming from China of how its government works. America has a Congress. China, as it turns out, also has a Congress. The average American, however, is likely to be correctly skeptical about whether this body is actually exercising any substantial decision-making authority. He suspects that finding out how China's government actually works is likely to be a difficult task, and one that will require some considerable research.

But for some reason, these thoughts never seem to occur to him about his own government, even though every single one would be just as appropriate.

In the case of America, he has been inculcated with the official organisational chart since birth. There are three branches - legislative, judicial and executive. They exist in a separation of powers, and all are ultimately answerable to the voters, who elect Congress and the President, and thus can eventually appoint all the Supreme Court nominees.

Granted, this is not an absurd description. All these bodies really do exist. At some point, perhaps, this was how governmental decisions in America were actually made.

On the other hand, our hypothetical reader would need to only click on a news website on almost any given day to find events that seem wholly inconsistent with this being the set of people who in practice make decisions as to how government runs.

To take but one example, it was recently announced that Harriet Tubman will replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill.

This, of course, raises a number of questions that the average person almost certainly never gets around to asking, but probably should.

Let's start with the basics.

Who, exactly, decided that this would happen?

As a beginning, he has absolutely no idea. Without googling, he couldn't even name the office behind this decision.

Reading through the article, we're told that this was announced by Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. Hands up, nice and high, if you've ever heard that name before.

More to the point, being announced by Jack Lew is not the same as being decided by Jack Lew. If it were just decided by Jack Lew, then we can somehow finagle all this akwardly into the notional chart. Obama appointed Lew, he could fire him (perhaps - who knows) and get someone else in who would put Jackson back on.

But how do you know who else was involved in this decision? Are you sure it was just Lew? There are 86,000 people working at the Treasury. You're certain it was just the top guy, on his own, who came up with the plan? Let's be honest, that seems pretty damn unlikely. If every decision is made singlehandedly from the top, what on earth are those 86,000 people doing each day?

If you fire Lew, it's possible the plan gets reversed. It's also possible that you've just fired the guy who's the spokesman, or the frontman for the operation. He'll just be replaced by someone else, and the show will merrily go on.

But even the 'treasury employees make the decision' model seems a little too neat. Indeed, the Washington Post article lists a number of groups and people that seem wholly alien to how this process is meant to work, including:
-Kari Winter, a professor who studies slavery at the University of Buffalo
-A viral campaign by a group "Women on $20s"
-Ben Bernanke
-A musical about Alexander Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who apparently was personally contacted by Lew in the leadup to this decision (when it was decided that Hamilton wasn't getting ditched from the $10)
-Liz Maatz, vice president of government relations for the American Association of University Women

One of two things seems true. Either these people are part of the actual decision-making process. Or the Washington Post is just asking random nobodies to give their opinion

Which do you suppose is more likely? Who do you suppose knows more about how government operates, you or the Washington Post?

Because, dear average interlocutor, let us get to the heart of the matter.

You still believe the notional org chart, because this is all you know. This decision must come from the Secretary of Treasury, which comes from the President, which comes from us, the voters. Ergo, we can reverse this by voting for Trump in November, who certainly wouldn't put up with this nonsense.

Perhaps.

But didn't they tell you this when you voted for George W. Bush twice? Looking back, what exactly did that get you?

You would do better to start by admitting some basic truths.

You have no idea who made this decision.

You have no idea how, or if, it could be reversed.

You have no idea who is actually governing you.

And if you've gotten that far, why are you so sure that voting will fix it?

The Other Great Geographic Discontinuity

Discontinuities are interesting things. When small differences in inputs result in large differences in outputs, it can sometimes give hints as to what exactly is causing what.

For instance, Douglas Almond's great paper on the in-utero effects of the Spanish Flu gets you mostly convinced just by a single picture

The ideal case observes a sharp discontinuity in a single input variable and examines the effect on the output. Economists search for these perfectly clean cases like financial traders search for arbitrage. They find them about as often, too.

But sometimes you get a second best instance - a case where a good fraction of the inputs stay smooth and continuous, and yet you observe a discontinuous shift in the output. This suggests that one of the remaining variables is having a large effect.

This is especially true in the case of development. The classic problem, concisely stated, is that goods go together and bads go together. In other words, countries tend to have good governance, good rule of law, a free press, low corruption, etc. or they have none of these things.

Boosters of the polite consensus wisdom occasionally enjoy pointing out the difference in light patterns between North and South Korea.



It is indeed a striking one. Scott Alexander cited it in his Anti-Reactionary FAQ as supporting the proposition that the quasi-monarchy of North Korea seems to result in much worse outcomes than the capitalist social democracy of South Korea.

Fair enough. So it does. Though of course what we're really seeing is the sum of all the differences between the North and South since the Korean War. The main quibble is the extent to which Kim Jong-Un is a good representation of monarchy as a system of government, but I take Alexander's point.

But if you're going to play that game, you have to take the comparisons that are not flattering to your world view, as well as the ones that are.

One such equally stark comparison is between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.





No, they didn't draw the border at some magically discontinuous shift in micro-climate. This is all one island of Hispaniola, split into two parts. It's just that the Haitians deforested their part of the island, leaving the land looking like it was denuded by a plague of locusts. The Dominicans, however, didn't.

And this is the start of a series of differences that are not quite as stark as North and South Korea, but they're pretty darn stark nonetheless. Haiti is supremely screwed, as bad as anywhere in the Third World. We're talking GDP per capita of $661 and life expectancy of 63 screwed. The Dominican Republic, by contrast is at $5442 and 74. Not exactly first world standards, but functional enough that westerners want to go there on holidays. To slightly modify the Hilltop Hoods - like a free trip to Port-Au-Prince, you don't want it.

And there basically is no polite explanation for why this is. The standard banalities about the causes of poverty don't get you very far. If Haiti's problem is that it was colonialized, so was the Dominican Republic. Admittedly the Haitian part was run by the French for more of its history, versus the Dominican Republic being run by the Spanish. But people don't usually clamor to attribute strong economic success to Spanish colonialism. In fact, the Dominican Republic was run as a colony for considerably longer, as recently as 1865 (compared with Haiti, which kicked out the French for the last time in 1804). Indeed, Haiti actually invaded and ran the Dominican Republic from 1821-1844, and got to implement some of its disastrous policies then.

The other sob stories don't get you much further either. Both areas had a lot of slaves. Both were administered by the US during the 20th century. And while the Dominican Republic produced a lot more sugar during the 20th century, this seems better understood as effect rather than just cause, as Haiti produced lots of sugar during the 18th century, and climate-wise could have done so again.

So since the countries were united for most of their history, one must expect that the causes might seem to be differences that were more pronounced after 1844.

First off, Haiti had killed most of its white population in a genocide, and added to its constitution in 1804 a clause that whites could not own property. Another country imposed this recently in the wake of similar genocidal behavior. You might almost conclude that this is a disastrous policy. It was imposed in the Dominican Republic too in 1821 when Haiti took over, but they hadn't gone for the full genocidal answer of killing all the whites. So even though lots of the Spanish left after their stuff was confiscated, enough of them stuck around, and eventually managed to successfully gain independence from Haiti in 1844. The Dominican Republic tended to be mostly governed by its richer and better-educated Spanish elite for much of its history, whereas Haiti mostly was governed by the descendants of slaves (either black or mulatto). Just look at the pictures of some of the presidents of the Dominican Republic. No matter how you cut it or interpret it, the difference is striking.



etc.

Now look at some of the corresponding presidents of Haiti




Of course, a closer examination makes all this a bit murkier. Even after most of the leaders above, both countries were sufficiently dysfunctional that the US chose to invade, in 1915 and 1916. Equally dysfunctional? It's hard to say, since this was the era before great GDP figures. In terms of long-serving leaders during the 20th century, they had different paths. Rafael Trujillo seems to have looked somewhat like Pinochet, brutal but effective. Papa Doc Duvalier seems like a cross between Idi Amin and Robert Mugabe, repulsive in every possible way. It turns out that being a black nationalist intent on driving out the mulatto elite tends to just produce a mass emigration of the educated parts of the populace. We've heard about that one before too. It's not for nothing that I compared him to Mugabe. Maybe this is the main difference, these two men. It's hard to say.

So we get to the end and don't get the neat schadenfreude of Scott Alexander's simple narrative. In the end, we observe a discontinuous outcome, not a discontinuous input, and identification still eludes us. I am not nearly enough of an expert to compile anything like an exhaustive list of the differences between the countries to say for sure what is driving it. And yet, the aerial photographs remain. Something is producing enormously discontinuous outcomes across small geographical differences. And if you dislike the things I've raised, does that not just deepen the puzzle? Admit it, my progressive friend - you don't have a satisfactory explanation for the difference, do you?

By any measure, Haiti has been profoundly misgoverned. The Dominican Republic serves as Banquo's Ghost, reminding us awkwardly that it didn't have to end up this way. It is not a happy tale, and the lessons, if there are any, don't seem to support the standard leftist narratives of why the third world is poor. No wonder you never hear about it.

Actually, that's not quite right.

You do occasionally hear about it, in the form of editorials in lefty western newspapers excoriating the Dominican Republic for its racism in deporting Haitian illegal immigrants, notwithstanding the fact that, by US definitions of race, the Dominican Republic itself is 80% black.

Yep, racism. That's the key to understanding all this, according to our intellectually bankrupt intellectuals. The overwhelmingly black Dominican Republic must be cast in the role of racist oppressor, because that's the only way by which the left can understand Haitian poverty, or indeed any poverty at all.

With such brilliant insights among our elites, I have no doubt that Haiti will soon be returned to the days when it produced leaders like Thomas-Alexandre Dumas and Alexandre Dumas.

I wouldn't hold your breath. Haiti has been collectively holding its breath for 200 years.

The surprisingly inconvenient implications of hereditary politicians

So Canada elects another Trudeau, the son of the last one. Meanwhile America ponders electing either its third Bush in 30 years or its second Clinton in 16 years.

Honestly, what is the polite acceptable explanation for all this nonsense?

Because I can only think of possibilities that are all in one way or another deeply hostile to beliefs that polite progressives hold. Either:

a) These are in fact the most qualified candidates in their respective countries, because ability to lead a country is extremely highly heritable, presumably due to an overwhelmingly strong genetic component (though Hillary Clinton doesn't fit this, being a spouse, not a blood relative)

b) These are not the most qualified candidates, and these are not even the candidates that the electorate really most wants, but they win anyway due to some combination of :

b. i) the fact that we are ruled by an iron oligarchy of powerful families and interests who perpetuate themselves, and/or

b. ii) the electorate is comprised of complete morons.

c) These are not the most qualified candidates, but these are the candidates that the electorate really wants, because the electorate really has a deep-seated desire to return either to a hereditary monarchy, or a system of alternating rule by powerful ruling families, a la medieval and renaissance Florence. 

I don't think these are mutually exclusive possibilities, and all have something of a ring of truth about them.

But seriously, is there some other answer I've missed that would be more acceptable to the way the world is portrayed in a high school civics class?

Don't hold your breath waiting for the media to discuss the implications of any of these hypotheses.

No Exit, Part 1: Secession

The two broad political ways that reactionaries talk about changing one's circumstances are voice (influencing the political environment where you are) and exit (leaving for a different political environment).

As far as I can tell, one of the main distinctions between conservatives and reactionaries is that the latter believe that voice is mostly a dead end under current political arrangements. There is little to hope for from the democratic process, except perhaps as a longshot mechanism for abolishing the democratic process itself. As a result, politics quickly becomes uninteresting, except as a sideshow and a freakshow. When one abandons the conceit that one's voice matters, why in the name of all that is holy would you voluntarily watch three hours of Republican candidates' debates? Have you read all the great books already? Is there really nothing else better on Netflix?

Okay, so what of exit?

Well, this can take several forms, none of them particularly likely.

At the mild end is moving to another, more acceptable, state. Though this presupposes you can find one to your taste (maybe Texas) that will stay that way (whoops, cancel Texas - with current immigration patterns, anyone want to wager on it still being a red state in 20 years?). The slightly more interesting version of this is the Free State Project - get enough like-minded people to move to one small state (in this case, New Hampshire) and vote to change it. You're still under the Federal Government, but it's a start.

But what else? Move to a more reactionary-minded country? That seems an even harder mission than moving to a liberty-minded US state. Singapore, perhaps? Maybe. But if there's one thing that the Arab Spring taught us, it's that the State Department takes a very fickle attitude to allies that don't quite toe the liberal democratic line. At the moment, they tolerate Singapore. I would be less confident that this will continue to be the case for the next 50 years.

The more interesting options involve a combination of voice and exit - find some existing piece of land to make into a new country, and run it as you like.

At a first glance, this seems hard, but more promising than the alternatives. There are a range of ways to find a piece of land to govern and turn into a sovereign entity. They vary considerably in practicality. At one end, one can create new land with a bunch of rafts in the middle of the ocean, like the seasteading guys. I think this shows how eager people are to build a new sovereign land - they're willing to fudge the whole 'land' bit to make it happen. The relatively small number of people who choose to live on boats in the ordinary course of events shows you that this ain't exactly plan A, except under very dire circumstances.

More likely you're down to two options. You can take an existing functional part of America and try to secede. Or you could take over an existing crappy country by a coup.

The $64,000 question, of course, is whether Washington would let either of these things happen.

Since both are a long way from happening, it's hard to get a definite answer. You need to dig around to see the reaction to fringe possibilities and try to extrapolate.

One that caught my eye was the following from February this year:

Feds raid Texas secessionist meeting

...Minutes into the meeting a man among the onlookers stood and moved to open the hall door, letting in an armed and armored force of the Bryan Police Department, the Brazos County Sheriff's Office, the Kerr County Sheriff's Office, Agents of the Texas District Attorney, the Texas Rangers and the FBI.

...In the end, at least 20 officers corralled, searched and fingerprinted all 60 meeting attendees, before seizing all cellphones and recording equipment in a Valentine's Day 2015 raid on the Texas separatist group.

...He acknowledged he used a "show of force," grouping officers from city, county state and federal law enforcement to serve a search warrant for suspicions of a misdemeanor crime. He said he had worries that some extremists in the group could become violent, citing a 1997 incident when 300 state troopers surrounded an armed Republic leader for a weeklong standoff.

This is very revealing. There is absolutely no logistical need to involve 5 separate law enforcement agencies to process a non-violent meeting of 60 people on the suspicion that they committed a misdemeanor offense. But they wanted to display the full power of the government, at all levels, to those who were under the impression that Their Voice Matters™ - you will have no support from existing power structures, even in Texas. They absolutely did not want to just send in the FBI to stoke possible paranoia about the Feds.

Of course, the separatists' actions seemed tailor-made to produce exactly this outcome:

The raid was a response to legal summons sent by Republic of Texas members to a Kerr County judge and bank employee, demanding they appear in the Republic's court at the Veterans and Foreign Wars building in Bryan the day the officers stormed in.

Jesus Christ, talk about stupid. With allies like these...

The current secessionist group made themselves obvious targets by threatening government officials. This is a fast way to not only tar yourselves as possibly criminal, but also to eliminate any sympathy among local law enforcement, some of whom might otherwise support the 'Texas Pride' angle of secession. You threaten judges, and don't expect blowback from every single cop in the country?

The motto should be 'we just want a vote on the issue'. That is much harder to argue against.

If Washington has one possible Achilles Heel, it is the following: they are not fully immune from their own propaganda about the nobility of the democratic process. Hence, if you actually get a vote to pass, resisting it becomes considerably harder.

Suppose, in other words, that the separatists actually manage to get Texas to hold a referendum on seceding, and it passes. With what language will Washington condemn the decision? How will they justify their desire to squelch the voice of the people? Do they not believe in Democracy, source of all that is good and right in the world?

The EU, while not strong enough to force countries to stay in against their will, is at least willing to display open contempt for the democratic process. The US, so far, is only willing to do so using the Supreme Court.

In 1860, the answer was straightforward - "F*** you, you don't get to leave".

Do you think they still have the stones to say that, and back it up? I truly don't know.

I think they would worry where the next move in the chess game went - should the State of Texas attempt to engage in forced secession, would the Feds be willing to send in the army to shoot the place up with the TV cameras rolling, firing on US citizens?

For obvious reasons, they prefer to fight this preemptively as a law enforcement action, not as a military action. We're not invading, old chap, just sending in the police to arrest some crazies who broke the law. In 1860, there wasn't an FBI to send in to arrest Jefferson Davis, hence you needed to send in the army.

By contrast, it is much easier today to co-ordinate with the police to squelch secessionist movements early on, but much harder to us the military to stop them once they get going.

When events get to a certain level of seriousness, even the police become very apprehensive about shooting. See: Cliven Bundy




It's not just the US military that is shy about civilian casualties. If you're from the Federal Bureau of Bureaucratic Bureacracy, do you really want to be the guy who gave the order to shoot a man on horseback waving a US flag in front of TV cameras? That absolutely will not end well for your career.

But the Cliven Bundy supporters had one big advantage that a secessionist movement lacks - they only had to defend the status quo. In other words, show up with guns, call the news crew, and dare the Feds to make the first move.

(The other advantage they had is that, extremely mercifully, they had the good sense and collective discipline to not shoot or explicitly threaten any government officials. You'd think this would go without saying, but apparently not. These guys were at least decently media-savvy - the numerous US flags were a very nice touch to make the Feds look like the bad guys).

The secessionist movement, by contrast, has to actually convince people to implement a big change. Hence, anyone opposing a secessionist movement has the easier task of delegitimising the movement before it gets going to just cement the status quo. And the fastest way to do this is to transform it into a question of legality before the vote takes place.

In other words, find some Texas federal judge to declare the purported referendum illegal and unconstitutional before the vote actually happens. This will give any sympathetic law enforcement agencies free reign to arrest those who continue to take steps towards holding the referendum at all. And now, the secessionists, even if armed, have to defend their right to have an illegal vote that the Constitution (peace be upon it, even if it's living) forbids, without even knowing whether they'd win the vote, should it actually occur.

This achieves two things. First, it reduces the number of people still willing to push for (now illegal) secession. And secondly, it gives a strong propaganda angle to convince people who are on the fence about the whole thing - you can bet your bottom dollar that the New York Times would be pulling out all the stops to convince the marginal rube voter that these are just a bunch of crazy armed criminals. Don't you know they're willing to do stuff that's illegal? (Forget that it was the American War of Independence, not the American Court Case of Independence). But convince enough people of their crazy illegal status, and the best case scenario is mass arrests. The worst case scenario is Waco #2 on a much bigger scale if someone pulls the trigger first and events spiral out of control.

If the Achilles heel of Washington is that they struggle to challenge the righteousness of a democratic election, the Achilles heel of secessionists is that they struggle to abandon their allegiance to the Constitution, even just Anthony Kennedy's interpretation thereof.

The problem for secessionists, I fear, is that in any likely secession timeline, the second question will necessarily get resolved before the first one.

The worst law in London

What does absurd government monomania in the face technological irrelevance look like?

Back in the early years of the 20th century, before computers had become widespread, the word 'calculator' actually referred to people. They would perform large numbers of arithmetic calculations, essentially being a slow and kludgy version of a spreadsheet.

Let's suppose, hypothetically, that being a human computer was a licensed and highly regulated profession in 1920. The government required you to study for years, and prove that you could do hundreds of long division calculations without making a mistake. A whole mystique grew up about 'doing the sums', the examination required to become a calculator. Only licensed calculators were permitted to perform arithmetic operations for more than half an hour a day in a commercial setting

Then IBM popularises the computer, and  Richard Mattessich invents the spreadsheet, and it becomes totally clear to absolutely everybody that 'doing the sums' is completely worthless as a skill set. Not only is keeping the current regulation raising costs by a lot, but it's producing huge deadweight loss from all the people devoting years of their life to studying something that's now completely redundant.

What do you think the response of the government and the public would be once it became apparent that the new technology was cheap and easily available? Immediate repeal of the absurd current regime? Outcry and anger at the horrendous government-mandated inefficiency?

Ha! Not likely,

I suspect the old regime would trundle merrily along, and the New York Times would write philosophically-minded pieces extolling the virtues of it.

Because, dear reader, there actually exists regulation exactly this disgraceful - The Knowledge, the required examination for London taxi drivers.

The New York Times Magazine wrote a long piece describing just how much taxi drivers are required to memorise:

"You will need to know: all the streets; housing estates; parks and open spaces; government offices and departments; financial and commercial centres; diplomatic premises; town halls; registry offices; hospitals; places of worship; sports stadiums and leisure centres; airline offices; stations; hotels; clubs; theatres; cinemas; museums; art galleries; schools; colleges and universities; police stations and headquarters buildings; civil, criminal and coroner’s courts; prisons; and places of interest to tourists.

 Test-takers have been asked to name the whereabouts of flower stands, of laundromats, of commemorative plaques. One taxi driver told me that he was asked the location of a statue, just a foot tall, depicting two mice sharing a piece of cheese. It’s on the facade of a building in Philpot Lane, on the corner of Eastcheap, not far from London Bridge.

What, in the name of all that is holy, is the purpose of making it a legal requirement of driving a taxi that you can name the location of a foot-tall statue of two mice that exists somewhere in London?

In the first place, the demand for finding the location of a statue like this from your taxi driver is zero. A precisely estimated zero, as the statisticians say. The revenues side of the ledger is a donut. It is literally inconceivable that the location of this statue has been the subject of a legitimate question towards a London taxi driver in the history of the entire profession. The only benefit is rent-seeking and limiting the size of the taxi industry. So why not just make them memorise the Roman Emperors in chronological order, or the full text of War and Peace? It would serve just as much purpose.

Not only is there no value to your taxi driver knowing this, but if I type in 'statue of two mice in London' into Google, the first image lists the location as 'Philpot Lane'. (The only sites that come up, ironically, are ones referencing the damn test, suggesting just how pointless this knowledge is). The internet has made memorising this kind of trivia, for all possible sets of London trivia, irredeemably useless.

Everything a taxi driver needs to know has been replaced by a smartphone. Everything. Which is why every man and his dog can drive Uber around just fine.

So what threadbare arguments does the NYT offer when, three quarters of the way through the article, it finally gets around to discussing the question of whether this damn test is worth anything?

Taxi drivers counter such claims by pointing out that black cabs have triumphed in staged races against cars using GPS, or as the British call it, Sat-Nav. Cabbies contend that in dense and dynamic urban terrain like London’s, the brain of a cabby is a superior navigation tool — that Sat-Nav doesn’t know about the construction that has sprung up on Regent Street, and that a driver who is hailed in heavily-trafficked Piccadilly Circus doesn’t have time to enter an address and wait for his dashboard-mounted robot to tell him where to steer his car.

Okay, I'll bite. They beat them in staged races by... how much? One minute? Maybe two? Perhaps 60 or 70% of the time? And the value of this time-saving is what, exactly? How does it compare to the extra time the person waited trying to hail a cab because of the artificial limit on the number of taxis?

It seems that New York Times writers are not required to distinguish between statements like 'the revenue side of the income statement here has literally no items on it' and the statement 'this is a positive NPV project that should be invested in'. Disproving the first statement is sufficient to establish the truth of the second. Look, there's a benefit! Really! See, it shows it must be a good idea to do the project.

Perhaps sensing the unpersuasive ring of this argument to anyone who's ever ridden in an Uber and found it cost 40% of the price, we then get another tack:

Ultimately, the case to make for the Knowledge may not be practical-economic (the Knowledge works better than Sat-Nav), or moral-political (the little man must be protected against rapacious global capitalism), but philosophical, spiritual, sentimental: The Knowledge should be maintained because it is good for London’s soul, and for the souls of Londoners. 

Well, in that case!

But riddle me this - how, exactly, can I tell whether this egregious rent-seeking and artificial deadweight loss monopoly is good for London's soul? 

The Knowledge stands for, well, knowledge — for the Enlightenment ideal of encyclopedic learning, for the humanist notion that diligent intellectual endeavor is ennobling, an end in itself. 

'Enlightenment'. You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

Learning is definitely good. Government-mandated learning, especially when used as part of banning the consensual commercial activity of many individuals, is a wholly separate matter.

Just ask someone from the Enlightenment, like John Stuart Mill:

But, without dwelling upon supposititious cases, there are, in our own day, gross usurpations upon the liberty of private life actually practised, and still greater ones threatened with some expectation of success, and opinions propounded which assert an unlimited right in the public not only to prohibit by law everything which it thinks wrong, but in order to get at what it thinks wrong, to prohibit any number of things which it admits to be innocent.

Like, for instance, driving a cab without studying for years to satisfy a ludicrous exam requirement. 

But it's not just the higher taxi fees and difficulty getting a cab at the wrong time of night that make up the real tragedy here. What's the human toll of making every potential taxi driver learn this kind of nonsense, regardless of whether they ultimately succeed?

McCabe had spent the last three years of his life thinking about London’s roads and landmarks, and how to navigate between them. In the process, he had logged more than 50,000 miles on motorbike and on foot, the equivalent of two circumnavigations of the Earth, nearly all within inner London’s dozen boroughs and the City of London financial district. 

 It was now 37 months since he’d paid the £525 enrollment fee to sign on for the test and appearances. “The closer you get, the wearier you are, and the worse you want it,” McCabe said. “You’re carrying all this baggage. Your stress. Worrying about your savings.” McCabe said that he’d spent in excess of £200,000 on the Knowledge, if you factored in his loss of earnings from not working. “I want to be out working again before my kids are at the age where someone will ask: ‘What does your daddy do?’ Right now, they know me as Daddy who drives a motorbike and is always looking at a map. They don’t know me from my past, when I had a business and guys working for me. You want your life back.”

Apparently this must be a strong case of the false consensus effect, because reading this paragraph filled me with furious rage, but the NYT writes about it as one of those quaint things they do in old Blighty.

In the end, McCabe gets his license, so it's all a happy story!

He does not, however, get the three years of his life and £200,000 back.

How on earth do the parasites who run the testing and administration of this abomination justify all this to themselves? How do they explain their role in this shameful waste of money and fleeting human years, the restrictions on free and informed commerce, the ongoing fleecing of consumers, and the massive, groaning, hulking, deadweight loss of this monstrous crime against economic sense and liberty?

They must be either extraordinarily intellectually incurious, morally bankrupt, or both.

As the Russians are fond of saying, how can you not be ashamed?

On the dissolving of political bands and the causes impelling separation

Well, Scottish independence has come and gone, thank God. The list of grievances being cited was pathetic enough to make even the complaints of the American colonists (already laughably overblown) seem like the accounts of survivors from North Korean prison camps.

But one thing this whole debacle really illustrated is the following: very few people these days think in a principled way about secession. When, if ever, do a group of people have a right to secede from a country? Do they even need legitimate grievances? How many of them need to agree, and by what margin?

This is certainly true in America. What are the two historical events that most people in this country agree on? Firstly, that the American revolution was a jolly good thing and entirely appropriate. And secondly, that the civil war was fortunately won by the North, whose cause was ultimately just (this is probably still somewhat disputed in the South today, but I think it's probably broadly agreed on overall).

Ponder, however, the surprising difficulty in reconciling those two positions in a principled manner. For some thoughts on the justification for the Cofederacy, meet Raphael Semmes, a Captain of the Confederate States Navy. Have a read of how an actual member of the Confederacy justifies the South's position. It's all in the first couple of chapters of his book, 'Memoirs of Service Afloat', which Gutenberg has for free here.

If you're too lazy to read the original, his argument is quite simple. Firstly, he argues that the same rights that gave the states the ability to join the union gave them the right to leave - they were separate political entities capable of their own decisions, a status that predated the union. Second, he argues that the people of the North and the people of the South are fundamentally dissimilar in attitude and culture. And finally, that the North had been oppressing the South. over the years, and the South simply wanted out.

Now, you may consider these arguments persuasive or unpersuasive. But before you decide, it is worth comparing them to the arguments that the American Colonists claimed as their justification for seceding from Britain. Semmes' argument, if you boil it down, essentially says that we claim the same right to secede from the Union as the thirteen colonies claimed as their right to secede from Britain.

Perhaps slavery is the trump card, the elimination of which (presuming for a moment that this was the sole rationale for the war from the Northern perspective, a far from obvious point) had such moral force that it overwhelmed all the other arguments. But without this logical Deus Ex Machina, it is quite challenging to come up with a consistent set of principles under which the colonies independence was was justified but the South's was not. It's not impossible, but it's not straightforward either. And when you're done with that, be sure to reconcile it with your thoughts on independence in Kosovo, Catalonia, Chechnya, the Kurds in Turkey, ISIS in northern Iraq and other modern examples.

Or put it this way - hypothetically, had the South agreed to abolish slavery, and then done so in a way that meant reinstating it was impossible, but afterwards still insisted on secession, would their cause have been justified then?

I really don't know what most Americans would say to that one.

I don't think Americans are alone in this unthinking attitude to the question.

You saw this exactly on display in the Scottish fiasco. Most political unions don't contain explicit descriptions of how they can be dissolved. This goes doubly so for countries like Britain, which don't have a formal constitution at all.

What this means is that it's entirely unclear when or which bits of it can break off. Scotland at least had the virtue of being a polity with its own history, own accent, own traditions and so forth. People know who 'The Scots' are, so you don't need to explain why they should be considered their own entity. But what if Glasgow decided that, notwithstanding the opinion of the rest of Scotland, they wanted to secede from the UK themselves. Could they do it? Population-wise, there's as many people living in Glasgow (596,000) as Montenegro (625,000)or Luxembourg (549,000). And if Glasgow, what about Inverness (72,000)?

And not only that, but the lack of formality was on display by the method of deciding the question. A single referendum, with the Scots as the only people being consulted. Moreover, for a decision this momentous, you might assume that you need some kind of supermajority or something. But since we can't specify that kind of thing ahead of time, the default assumption is that a simple majority will do, one time. If 50.01% of Scots want to leave, then out they go. Bad luck for the remaining 49.99%. Bad luck for any Scots yet to come who might have preferred the union. I suspect that if Cameron had thought he might lose, he might have asked for a higher standard. But a) how would he justify that higher number, and b) if he did, would he then be bound by the outcome?

For a lot of major political decisions, the public never gets consulted at all. It's not clear if the British will get a vote on whether to stay in the EU. They did get a referendum in 1975 to decide whether to join the European Economic Community (which later became the EU) but you'd be a bold man to claim that that signing up to the EEC meant a full knowledge of the leviathan that the EU would later become. In November 2012, support for leaving the EU was 56%. Under the one-time, one-vote rule, that could have been enough to get them out. One might say that holding this vote would force exclusion from the EU for future Brits, who might not be able to change their minds. Then again, one could equally say that the vote in 1975 forced inclusion on lots of modern Brits who now also can't change their mind.

I don't pretend there's easy answers to any of these questions. The libertarians would say every individual has the right to secede from any group, which is a consistent, if difficult to implement position.

But the whole Scotland thing has shown is that avoiding thinking about these kinds of questions doesn't make them go away. They're going to come up periodically, and you just get incoherent answers by not having any contingency plans.

Everyone goes into marriages thinking they'll last forever. And yet we still think it prudent to have divorce procedures well known in advance.

Since I'm mostly a fan of formalism, I think countries would benefit from the same arrangements.

Oh Noz! OMG!

Apparently the USDA website is shut down due to the government funding crisis.

This prompts two responses from me:

1. Oh no! How will we ever possibly survive without whatever the hell it is the USDA website is meant to do. It will seriously impact the ability of the USDA to deliver key services in...er...um...

2. These people apparently have such a low opinion of your intelligence that they think you aren't aware that it doesn't actually cost any money to leave a web page in the same state it was in. Quite the contrary - it costs money to change the web page. If the web server were shut down due to lack of money, you wouldn't get any page at all.

I can scarcely think of a better advertisement for firing everybody who signed off on this absurd stunt. Or, you know, just fire the whole USDA. Be honest, do you even know what these clowns do? Have you noticed the lack of services from them in your life recently? If US farmers stopped making milk, I wager you'd notice that pretty quickly. If the USDA stopped interfering in this process, it's far less obvious that you'd miss it.

Thanks to Hector Lopez for the pointer.

Rent-Seeking vs. Rent-Collecting

When historians of the future are writing the epitaph for the west, I imagine that one of the characteristics that will strike them about the present age is the increasing prevalence of rent-seeking.

As the government inexorably expands in size and scope, it becomes more of a suckers game to simply outcompete the opposition, and more lucrative to lobby the government to have them shut down.

This might take any number of forms - ludicrous licensing requirements that lower supply, absurd restrictions on competitor firms, tax breaks for your particular boondoggle industry - whatever works.

If you want a list of some of the more outlandish ones, browse through the cases the Institute For Justice has fought over the years. It's a Sisyphean task, alright.

The strange thing, though, is that most people profess to hate rent-seeking. So how come we end up with so much of it?

Part of this is simply political economy. A small but organised group fighting for a large benefit will often out-lobby a large dispersed group (e.g. taxpayers, consumers) who each suffer a small harm.

Part of it is just rank hypocrisy - when other companies lobby for their licensing requirements, it's just to squelch consumers, but I'm deeply worried about customers not getting their hair braided correctly.

Nobody is the villain in their own narrative, after all.

But I don't think that's all of it.

I think that to really understand the extent of rent-seeking, you need to appreciate those who enable them - the rent-collectors.

The way I would characterise it is that rent-seeking, properly defined, is about lobbying for socially inefficient laws and regulations that will benefit you privately.  The trial lawyers lobby turns up to argue that we really truly ruly need to have a legal system where the loser doesn't pay the other side's costs, for instance.

Rent-collecting on the other hand, is what happens when a party simply takes advantage of a bad law that is already on the books. Unlike the rent-seeker, the rent-collector does not actively push for socially inefficient legislation. Instead, he simply takes the inefficient law as he finds it - somebody is going to get the rents due to the bad law, and it may as well be me.

These are the much wider circle of folks who are thus corrupted by the process - their own self-interest stops them agitating for a repeal of the bad laws, but their lack of involvement in the initial setup means that their consciences are clean.

For every community organiser who gets a cushy job on the rent-control board, there are hundreds of tenants getting a few hundred bucks a month for free from their landlord.

For every creep in the restaurant lobby fighting to outlaw food trucks, there are hundreds of restaurant proprietors vaguely relieved to not have a truck parked nearby.

And sometimes, the rent-collectors (at least indirectly) will be people who in other circumstances would be the first ones to crusade against rent-seeking.

American securities class action lawsuits are like something out of a Kafka novel. The shareholders of a company collectively own the company. Suppose the company makes some screwup and causes the share price to drop. Based on the fact that the company is a separate legal entity, some lawyer and a gold-digging lead plaintiff will file suit on behalf of the shareholders against the management of the company that they themselves own. The management is of course protected by the company, so money is coming out of the company coffers (which the shareholders own) to nominally compensate the shareholders of the company. Got that? Well, actually, the current shareholders (who don't owe an actual duty to anybody) are indirectly paying money to the old shareholders (who often overlap substantially with the current shareholders). In theory, anyway. Part of the money is coming from insurance companies who write the professional indemnity insurance for the directors, but the company is going to be paying that back in higher premiums in no time flat. You can rest assured that the only people making any money off the whole farce are the lawyers.

Or are they? Who else benefits from this ridiculous charade?

A lot of the time, it's economic consulting firms. They make a decent living defending companies against these lawsuits, and showing that the damages aren't as high as the often ludicrous plaintiff's claims make out to be. These are some of the most free market types you can imagine, with economics degrees from the best universities.

Don't get me wrong, in the scheme of this whole monstrosity, these guys are far and away the most defensible. They're fighting for good guys, so to speak.

But still - how many of them would be out there lobbying to get securities class action reform to eliminate all this absurd waste? How many of them would honestly greet such reform with the same zeal that they would if it happened in any other industry? Even if it put them out of a job?

To ask these questions is to know the answers.

When despotic regimes take prisoners of war, one of the things they often try to get the captives to do is to write out statements that are disloyal to their home country. Sooner or later, cognitive dissonance takes over - the things you wrote down that you originally didn't believe, you come to believe, because you subconsciously prefer this view to the alternative that you wrote cowardly and disloyal things rather than face punishment. The extreme form of the result is Stockholm Syndrome. There's a reason that making disloyal statements is punished as a serious offense.

The reality is that behind every rent-seeking lobbyist are thousands of rent-collecting regular joes who have convinced themselves either that a) the current regime is either downright sensible, or b) at a minimum, it's terribly unfortunate but there's really nothing to be done, old chap.

Thus are the sheep corrupted to be complicit in their own fleecing. They'd all acknowledge that, sure, this is just robbing Peter to pay Paul. They'd further acknowledge that, sure, everyone here thinks they're Paul, and sure, they can't all be right. But still, when all's said and done, I really will be Paul, and that's all that matters, right?

Singapore and Hong Kong - A Tale of Two Reactionary Cities

Singapore is often held up as a kind of model reactionary state among the nations in existence today. It has incredibly low crime rates, low taxes, general social harmony, and has broadly built itself up from being a swamp to first world country in 60 years. It's also done this while juggling a tricky ethnic mix that's produced social conflict in many other countries. Lee Kuan Yew pulled this impressive feat off in part by restricting democracy and the freedom of the press, thus reducing the means by which ethnic tension can be whipped up. Most westerners dislike both of these aspects, but its hard to argue with results.

Back when I was but a wee Holmes in high school, I was a fervent (small 'd') democrat. I remember in an otherwise worthless social science class discussing with a Singaporean friend of mine about how his country was run. He was a defender of their system, and argued that it was actually popular with the people. I tended to not believe him, and always wanted to know why, if the government thought they were so popular, didn't they put matters to a fair vote? A failure to do so must mean that they suspected they'd lose.

It took me a long time to realise that on this point, I was wrong. The firstfact to understand about Singapore is that even though their 'democracy' is a joke, the government would very likely win an actual fair election. They are popular. The fact that people aren't voting on civic matters cannot be equated with them being unhappy about civic matters. Witness the outpouring of genuine joy and interest in the royal baby if you don't think this kind of thing is possible.

But here's the bigger question - what is the one, big genuine knock on Singapore as a place to live?

It's boring.

And this, alas, is true. There is really nothing interesting going on there. You can shop. That's about it.

It's tempting to dismiss this as a trivial concern, or as being a spurious one-off point, but I'm not sure that's true.

My guess is that the policies used to maintain the very high level of  social order -- restricting freedom of the press and voting, high alcohol taxes, large punishments for all crimes -- are indeed likely to discourage creative types from moving there, and potentially likely to discourage certain aspects of creativity in the local populace. 

In other words, you may not like the hippies of San Francisco, but it's not an accident that the interesting restaurants and art galleries are located nearby. When it comes to eccentric thinking and bon vivant lifestyles, there may be a certain amount of taking the bad with the good that's required.

But this is where (British) Hong Kong provides an interesting counterpoint.

Hong Kong managed to achieve a lot of the same material successes as Singapore. But it never had the same reputation for being boring. Hong Kong cinema was long famous, and the city is filled with interesting restaurants, bars and galleries. Also, notably, Hong Kong does not share Singapore's restrictions on civic life. The newspapers were largely free to publish whatever they wanted. The court system was actually applying genuine British Common Law, rather than twisting concepts like defamation to become de facto censorship tools against criticism of the government. And while the crime rate was not so famously low (the Triads, for instance, have no obvious Singaporean equivalent), it was fairly peaceful.

So what explains the difference? Should we just conclude that Singapore should just chill out a bit on the freedom of the press?

Well, maybe. But there's something else that may explain it.

If you haven't read it yet, Slate Star Codex gave a pretty good summary of reactionary ideas. In particular, consider the claim of Mencius Moldbug - that a truly secure sovereign would have no need to care what its citizens thought. This is true, and also would be a big benefit - you don't have to constantly wage a propaganda war over what people believe.

But Slate Star Codex also pointed out some of the conceptual problems with this idea - in particular, you can't just assume a hypothetical totally secure sovereign. Real sovereignty has to be enforced, and that almost always means caring about the opinions of at least some subset of the public, even if only the guys with guns. Cryptographic weapons are the Moldbug answer, but with 3D printed guns already available, it's not clear how feasible this is.

Still, this mental exercise helps to illuminate part of the difference between Hong Kong and Singapore. In Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew only had the resources of Singapore to secure Singapore. If enough people start agitating for change, and the army isn't willing to shoot them, then he's out on his @$$. Hence the somewhat draconian efforts to control the popular discourse.

But in Hong Kong, the British were able to entirely secure the colony almost without regard to what the subjects thought, should they desire. The reason is that they could just send in the Royal Navy. And because this force operated effectively without any concern for the average Hong Kong resident's opinion, Britain had a role much closer to the hypothetical Moldbug sovereign - they say what they want, I do what I want.

And this allowed for something closer to Moldbug's Fnargl - the sovereign immune to any attack from the locals. At least as predicted, this allowed for a much more relaxed attitudes towards civil society.

But we arrive at a somewhat awkward conclusion - the ideal sovereign is not truly sovereign, but reliant on some larger power to ensure its survival irrespective of local opinion.

And hence you can see why Hong Kong features perhaps less prominently in the reaction circles. Until you can find a way to make us all subjects of enlightened British civil servants, one may need the guarantee of some higher authority to get a sovereign that truly doesn't give a rat's. Or accept that order requires no freedom of the press and not many art galleries.

This is not an ideal conclusion, of course, but nobody said that reality had to conform to our highest hopes.

On the other hand, both Hong Kong's governors and Lee Kuan Yew would have likely done a damn sight better job at managing Detroit than democracy has done. No sense letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Some PR advice for the PRC

If you look across the countries of the world, it is a reliable trend that any country featuring the word ‘Democratic’ in its name is both
a) A hellhole, and
b) Not at all democratic.
Think ‘The Democratic Republic of the Congo’ or ‘The German Democratic Republic’.

In many ways, this is isn’t surprising – the countries with the worst governance records and the least scruples want to cloak themselves with the veneer of respectability by claiming to be what they think polite society demands they be. This doesn’t fool anybody except the rubes, of course. But at least it indicates a clear estimate of where they think the positive brand equity lies, and it seems to be in ideas like ‘Democratic’.

Which makes China all the more puzzling.

The Chinese Communist Party has been becoming less communist ever since at least when Deng Xiaoping took over. These days, it is not meaningfully Communist at all.

In fact, if it were to rename itself ‘The Chinese Capitalist Party’, the description would probably actually be more accurate (although clearly imperfect).

But instead, they still want to keep clinging to the title ‘Communist’. This is odd to me. Maybe it just reveals my biases, but at least by my estimate of the ‘polite society’ metric, Communism has some pretty toxic brand capital – the forced labour camps, the gulags, the man-made famines, the hundred-odd million corpses piled up over the course of the 20th century. It’s not as toxic as the ‘Fasicm’ or ‘Nazi’ brands, of course (in public perception at a least, regardless of whether you think the relative ranking is deserved).  But if you just wanted to convey a sense of ‘caring about the workers and the poor’, what about ‘Socialist’ or ‘Social’? Surely that would be an improvement.It’s almost as if the Republican Party wanted to use its current policies but refer to itself as the Nazi Party.

My guess is that this is mainly due to wanting to maintain the legitimacy of the current regime by implying a historical continuity in the lineage of power (to disguise the almost 180 degree turn in some of the policies). How else do you explain the cultish devotion to images of Mao, notwithstanding that Mao would probably have a fit if he saw the current policies being implemented by the current ‘Communist’ party?

The best description to me of the current Chinese government, at least domestically, is ‘like Singapore in a number of its attitudes towards policy, but more corrupt and with a more puzzling internal party mechanism’.
But ironically, unlike the Democratic Republic of Congo, I think this current labeling does fool more people than just the rubes. I imagine it colors a fair bit of the instinctive hostility to the Chinese government in the west,  at least to extent that they continue to pay obeisance idolize a bankrupt and depraved ideology, even as they disavow it through their actions.

In other words, their actions have actually justified jettisoning what seems to me to be a disastrous linkage, but they cling to it tightly.

I guess they just don’t think that Communism is such a loathsome thing to be associated with. I’d like to think they’re totally wrong, but depressingly I’m not so sure.